Kidnap

Halle Berry stars in this fast-moving thriller, as a divorced mother who goes into attack mode once her six-year-old son gets abducted. The film wastes little time on exposition: the boy is kidnapped within the opening minutes, and after that it's one long, tense chase, with Berry's character following the kidnappers across seemingly endless stretches of the Louisiana interstate. Screenwriter Knate Lee makes the most of the elemental concept by devising complications every few minutes to keep the story going, while director Luis Prieto injects some nice local color to the proceedings, which keeps the movie from feeling generic. Yet the most valuable member of the crew may be editor Avi Youabian, who maintains a breathless pace without sacrificing any sense of spatial continuity. This is a superior genre exercise, unpretentious and formally controlled.
ByBen Sachs